I have spent a reasonable amount of time planning an itinerary for our year away. Mostly this is based on personal preferences for where we would like to visit, which aren’t likely to exactly match your preferences.

In terms of general approach, however, here are a few tips that you might find helpful to plan your own travel itinerary:

Start with a wish list of everywhere you might like to visit – if you are like us this will be way too long, as once you start it is difficult to stop!

Depending on how much time you have and how slowly you wish to travel, prioritise your wish list down to a more realistic number of destinations, e.g. one destination for every two weeks of available travel time.

Now you have a list of possible destinations, put them into a spreadsheet…trust me on this one, it will make it much easier to play with route combinations later on.

Unless you really couldn’t care less about weather, add climate information into the same spreadsheet by adding the months of the year across the top of your page and then finding temperature / rainfall information for each destination for each month.

Adding general climate information should also be helpful in identifying each areas likely “peak” season, when costs are likely to be higher than normal.

You can now start to “colour in” your spreadsheet – any colours will do, but create something to highlight the best times of year to visit each location and something else to highlight any times of the year that might be better avoided, e.g. hurricane season.

Now you can start to juggle destinations to get the best alignment for you based on when your trip starts, the best times of year to land in different locations, and logical geographical groupings.

Running through this approach should also be useful in identifying the best time of year to start your trip, based on where you would like to visit and where you are starting from. You are likely to find that this approach throws up some conflicting choices, but I think it’s useful to think these through before you leave, even if you change your mind several times along the way!

Coming from the UK and travelling with two children, we have tried to plan a route that is both family friendly and hopefully sees us enjoying some sunshine. Of course, your considerations and priorities may be very different from ours, but hopefully you can find the right choices for you.

Disclaimer – In a small effort to help fund our round the world trip, we have joined the Agoda affiliate marketing scheme. We did this because we found Agoda to be the best hotel booking website for our intended destinations. This means that we will receive a small commission if you use the above link to book a hotel with Agoda and you will not pay anything extra.